


Where We Stand

by TheSightlessSniper



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Happy Ending, M/M, Movie References, OOC, Oneshot, Out of Character, reference to the GOTG Jackson Pollock line
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 18:27:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16068800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSightlessSniper/pseuds/TheSightlessSniper
Summary: "It begins as a fuck-buddy relationship.Harvey is blowing off steam after a particularly shitty, long-winded case that only went his way at the last second. Mike is just trying to forget how his marriage to Rachel crashed and burned just a year after the wedding, and that he was back to where he started with no job and no girlfriend.He didn’t have a boyfriend either, but at least on Friday nights even just for a little while, he had Harvey."





	Where We Stand

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration to write pretty much anything has been in the toilet recently. I've been exhausted, stressed, and desperately trying to find a new job to mitigate all three problems.
> 
> However...I return at least for now to bring you this! This...pile of word vomit which is mostly un-edited and may make no sense in areas. I hope you enjoy!

It begins as a fuck-buddy relationship.

Harvey is blowing off steam after a particularly shitty, long-winded case that only went his way at the last second. Mike is just trying to forget how his marriage to Rachel crashed and burned just a year after the wedding, and that he was back to where he started with no job and no girlfriend.

He didn’t have a boyfriend either, but at least on Friday nights even just for a little while, he had Harvey.

He’s on the bottom tonight, pressed into the bed face-first and letting out panted whines into the pillow before him as he’s thrusted into at speed. It hurts a little, but the pleasure is more prominent, and he rocks back into it the best he can, one hand seeking Harvey’s buttocks behind him and trying to pull him in deeper.

When they’re finished, and they’ve taken a business-like shower, Mike leaves for his own apartment and doesn’t speak to Harvey until Monday morning comes around.

 

The cycle continues with sexting.

He starts working at Specter-Litt again, and soon he and Harvey are back to kicking ass in the courtroom.

He’s just left Harvey’s office when a message springs up on his brand new watch:

_Your ass looks just as fuckable in those pants as it does when you’re bent over my bed._

He almost chokes on air, before recovering and whipping his phone out to reply:

_I’m free whenever you are._

That’s how, on what was going to be a quiet Monday night, Mike ends up riding Harvey on his terrace while gasping in the humid summer night air. By the time they finish the second round in the living room, and the third a little later on the bed, Mike is almost too exhausted to even shower.

Fluffing the pillows in their fresh cases, a still dripping wet and nude Harvey slides under and settles between the clean sheets. ‘You can crash here.’

It feels dangerous to take up this offer. Mike freezes mid-towel-drying his hair. ‘You sure?’

When he turns, Harvey is grinning. ‘It’ll be hell trying to find a taxi this time of night. And we might even be able to fit a round in before work tomorrow.’

He laughs back. ‘I’ll be lucky if I can sit down tomorrow, or walk without limping. I’m not so sure that more sex before work is the answer.’

‘It could be. I mean, it’s been a few weeks since I felt that monster inside me,’ Harvey bit his lip, eyes falling half-lidded as his gaze slides down Mike’s body and focuses on his prize.

He’d had no idea that Harvey was bisexual until they’d had just one scotch too many. They hadn’t been wasted, but Harvey had definitely been drunker than he’d seen him before; giggling, chewing on french-fries, and tipsily warbling along to “Shoot To Thrill” by AC/DC when they’d gotten onto sexual awakenings.

‘Are we talking the first sexual feelings, or confused sexual feelings?’ He’d shot back, stealing a handful of fries.

‘Both. First was Commander Leia in the infamous gold bikini. The other kind? You’re gonna have to pay up with yours first.’

Mike had laughed. ‘What makes you think I have one?’

‘You wouldn’t have asked otherwise!’

‘Fine. Late bloomer here. Antonio Banderas as Zorro. Go.’

Harvey choked on his drink. ‘Really? That late?’

Mike’s smile wavered. ‘I was raised Catholic, and attended a Catholic school. Anything vaguely sexual was sinful. Anything deviantly sexual was even worse.’

A hand had reached his knee, rubbing sympathetically, and just hadn’t stopped. A few minutes later, he had been in Harvey’s lap on his couch with their erections pressed together and grasped between their hands, moaning against his salt-and-scotch-flavoured lips.

He never did find out what had awoken Harvey’s sexuality, but they agreed that the sex was so good between them that there was no way that it could just be a one-time deal.

For the first time, he stays the night. He’s almost timid as he slides under the sheets, but it’s barely a second until Harvey is on him, lips and tongue and hands wandering and pecking and languidly making out in their sleepy state.

When he wakes up the next morning, Harvey’s arms are wrapped around him.

Suddenly he doesn’t want him to let go.

 

He struggles with his own betrayal of their no-feelings agreement throughout the day.

He ignores his phone unless it’s important, just focusing on his cases and his research and trying not to get jealous when he catches Donna looking at Harvey through the glass of the offices. She’s had feelings for Harvey for a long time. He had been able to tell that there had been a history there since the first moment he’d set eyes on them interacting. There was history there that even his and Harvey’s shared shenanigans couldn’t match up to.

At lunch, instead of going to Harvey’s office, he goes down to a cafe, and bumps into the one person he didn’t think he’d ever see again.

Jenny looks fantastic. Her eyes are bright and happy, and she’s bouncing a little boy on one hip while cradling an oat milk mocha in her free hand. He doesn’t expect the awkwardly-executed hug he gets, and she immediately beckons him to her table to sit with her. The past doesn’t seem to mean a lot to her anymore; she waves it off when he tries to bring it up. ‘Look, we’re different people now, and clearly we’re both doing well for ourselves, so can we not dwell on the dumb stuff?’ She’s married, a mom now, and her career has taken a strange turn since they last met. ‘I somehow got into cars. I started an internship at a mechanic’s garage, and it kind of escalated from there. Before I knew it, I was fixing cars, motorcycles…I even fixed up one of those really old cars from the sixties. You should have seen the guy’s face when we got it running for the first time in thirty years…’

In turn, he tells her about the entire saga of his law degree, abridging it to fit the hour. He tells her all about Rachel and his failed marriage, conveniently leaving out his new arrangement with Harvey, while sipping from his own latte and bouncing a giggling little Ozymandias on his knee.

When he glances at his watch, he blanches at the time. ‘Crap. I should have been back ten minutes ago.’

‘Hey, you’re a lawyer now. Say you were talking to a client.’

‘A client?’

‘I’ve got some legal stuff I want you to look over,’ She grins and takes her boy back, ’I’m thinking of opening up my own car workshop.’

Another hour and another coffee later, he leaves Jenny with a promise to call her to hang out and meet her husband, and feeling a little lighter than he did before.

 

He can’t get in the mood for it.

Harvey is doing all the right things, and moving in all the right ways as he moans and clenches around him, but his heart isn’t in it tonight; he’s all too aware that he’s already in too deep, slipping slowly into the throes of infatuation while Harvey is just getting a kick out of them fucking each other within an inch of consciousness on a regular basis.

Something must give, because Harvey stops halfway through, frowning a little. ‘You okay there?’

Mike tenses. He’s half-soft from distraction, stressed by the reel of thoughts playing through his mind. ‘Just…can’t seem to get into the right mood tonight.’

He expects some kind of a light-hearted taunt about it. Instead, Harvey simply rolls off and lies next to him on the bed, head resting on one elbow and nudging him. ‘You know that just because we’re in an arrangement, it doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me anymore, right? Come on, tell me what’s up?’

_I think I have feelings for you._ ‘It’s nothing. I think I’m just tired or something. Maybe you took it all out of me yesterday,’ he jokes.

Harvey huffs a chuckle. ‘Hey, you wanted it hard. But hey, it’s fine. We can just hang out if you want.’

That’s just what they end up doing. Following a shower together (and watching Harvey enthusiastically get himself off under the hot water), they order Thai food and put on some horror-comedy movie about a girl living through a Groundhog Day-type scenario. It’s almost domestic. It’s weird to think that he was buried inside Harvey just a few hours ago.

When the movie finishes, Mike goes to leave, but Harvey stops him. ‘Cabs are hard to get this late, dummy. And you have a clean suit in my closet anyway. Just stay.’

 

The infatuation is only growing worse.

He’s beginning to get sick of Donna making eyes at Harvey all over again. At one point, he wanted them to be together, and thought that they might find a happy ending together. Now he wants to be selfish; he guiltily wishes he had Harvey all to himself. He thinks of the pretty, thin band of metal that had been wrapped around Jenny’s ring finger, the wedding photo she had shown him on her phone of her and her husband saying their vows in the middle of a pretty rose arbor somewhere just outside of New York. He want for himself.

Harvey is the only person he seems to be able to imagine saying those vows to.

Somehow he ends up at Harvey’s again, only this time there’s the smell of chicken permeating the air with a delicious haze the moment he walks through the door. He’s long stopped announcing his arrival, simply stuffing his key into his pocket and slipping off his shoes by the door.

When he gets around the corner, he doesn’t expect dinner to be placed in front of him on the counter. Eyeing it warily, he blinks from the plate to Harvey. ‘You cooked dinner.’

‘Yeah. I do occasionally use my oven.’

‘I thought you said you sucked at cooking?’

‘I do, but even an idiot knows how to roast a chicken, right?’ Harvey hands him a fork and gestures to the plate. ‘Try it.’

They eat together at the counter, the room quiet with the sound of some acoustic cover of a familiar song playing in the background. Every time he looks up to Harvey, he feels the odd sensation prickling on the back of his neck, like there’s something that Harvey isn’t telling him. Has he forgotten something?

The roast finished, they move onto dessert. This, Harvey most definitely hasn’t made; it’s mini summer fruit strudels from his favourite bakery, served with fresh whipped cream just how he likes it, although he doesn’t ever recall having told Harvey that. This too disappears soon enough, and Mike becomes increasingly aware that they’ve barely spoken a word to each other for the entire meal.

He can’t take it anymore. ‘Okay, what is this about?’

Harvey frowns, glass stopping halfway to his mouth. ‘What’s what about?’

‘This! The having food ready for me when I got here, the getting my favourite pastries. I can’t take not knowing.’

‘Not knowing what?’

He sighs, standing up. ‘I can’t take not knowing where we stand with our…arrangement.’

Harvey puts his glass down, sighing slowly and looking down. ‘Shit…look, maybe it’s best if you just go.’

Mike’s stomach twists. He feels like he’s been stabbed.

Harvey stands, clearing away the plates. ‘Look, I thought maybe there was something between us, like maybe there was something more than just great sex. Clearly I was way off. I’m sorry I got it so wrong.’

He doesn’t really know how he crosses the gap between them so quickly, but in an instant his hands find Harvey’s face and pull him in close. He cuts off whatever Harvey was about to ask with his lips, nudging him back until his hips bump the countertop behind him. As soon as Harvey’s leaning against it, Mike’s hands fondle for the edge of his shirt and tug it out of his suit pants, buttons pulling undone and one of them pinging off and clattering under one of the barstools at the island counter. Fervently Harvey kisses him back through it all, breaking the contact only to suck a mark into the hollow near his collarbones and bite down before returning to the earlier task. Dessert isn’t forgotten, but suddenly Mike has a few better ideas for the cream served with the pastries; he wants to lick it off Harvey, and he wants to lick it off of him all over.

The conversation can wait; not all conversations need words anyway.

They trail across the room, connected and touching and kissing as they go. The bedroom door shuts behind them, and the bed beckons.

 

As he walks through the bull-pen the next morning, Mike feels the eyes of everyone burning into every side of him as he walks through it. They’ve all seen it that morning; the linked hands as he and Harvey had walked onto the floor, the laced fingertips, the tender touch to the face as Harvey had left him with some case work, and the quick kiss to his lips…right as Donna had been walking up. Mike had been nervous, but ultimately she’d been supportive, and nothing seemed to have changed; they’re still laughing and joking so if it hurt to see him with Harvey, she wasn’t letting it show.

The office work experience girl—Elize, abnormal psychology major, nervous demeanour, and there to study lawyer and law office mentality more than anything else—smiles at him as he passes her some research to perform, and presses a coffee cup into his hands. ‘A present from Mr Specter. He asked me to go out and get this for you.’

Mocha, vanilla-laced, no sugar; the chocolate makes it sweet enough. He smiles back. ‘You get yourself anything?’

Her eyebrows shoot up behind her neatly-cut bangs. ’On…my boss’s credit card?’

‘Harvey doesn’t generally ask someone to get coffee then deny them one for themselves. Despite his outward appearance, he isn’t the devil in a really good suit.’ Retrieving his own card from his pocket, he hands it to her. ‘Your due diligence work yesterday was brilliant, and I know you were in at seven this morning because of the timestamp on your prints. Go down to the cart downstairs and get yourself a coffee on the company. Consider it a perk of being Harvey’s work experience girl.’

Her smile returns. ’Perk as in bonus, or as in caffeine high?’

‘Whichever gets you to go get yourself a coffee. Now go. Caffeinate yourself up to the eyeballs.’

He’s just back at his office when his phone buzzes:

_Louis wants us to use his membership to go mudding together. Can you think of anything we can do that night to get out of this?_

Mike quickly replies:

_Tell him that if we’re naked and muddy, we’re definitely going to end up having sex in front of him…make him think blacklight, Jackson Pollock painting._

Radio silence. And then:

_You’ve got issues, Quill._

 

It’s when Saturday arrives that Mike realises just how equally deep that Harvey is in whatever is between them.

He wakes up in his own bed; they stayed at Mike’s apartment that night. Indian food, and thanks to the rigours of the week, an early night falling asleep halfway through episode seven of what must have been their fifth re-watching of Firefly. No sex, no fooling around, just tender kisses and cuddling under the cool, clean sheets.

Harvey’s already awake, making himself fully at home in Mike’s kitchen. Harvey can’t cook that well—he can smell that something at some point has burned—but a few minutes later, the bedroom door opens, and he’s presented with a plate of pancakes drizzled in maple syrup and sprinkled with cinnamon. Harvey feeds him a few bites, and he returns the favour. But it’s not that which makes him understand. It’s afterwards, full-bellied and comfortable, when Harvey puts the plates to the side of the bed and crawls back under the sheets with him. It’s the touch of Harvey’s nose to his, forehead to forehead as they lie down and drift off to sleep again that he realises just how content he is, and how content he’s always been with Harvey since they first really became friends. With Rachel, he had been happy, even ecstatic at times. But it’s only now that it’s apparent that he was never really completely settled, never truly at home.

Harvey stirs, curling closer. ‘I never want to see you go again,’ he mumbles against Mike’s neck.

Those words are full of a pleasant weight. It’s too early to say it, but Mike already knows; there’s never going to be anyone else. This is it, and in Harvey’s arms, everywhere will like home.

**Author's Note:**

> I forgot to mention in the warnings:
> 
> Cliched, tooth-rottingly fluffy last line. Oops... ;D
> 
> Hope you enjoyed reading!


End file.
